Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Fair and balanced

In the 6 February 2012 issue of The Nation, I review two new books about copyright, William Patry's How to Fix Copyright and Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi's Reclaiming Fair Use.

Do we need to be policed if we're our own historians? Godwin didn't think so

At the New Yorker's blog, I have an essay about utopianism, self-narration, and the history of policing.

A few early, expensive comments by the novel about the other talent in the room

I recently read a stack of Elizabeth Taylor's novels, in preparation for writing an introduction to her novel A Game of Hide-and-Seek, to be reprinted as an NYRB Classic in February. In one of her later novels, In a Summer Season, published in 1961, there is a description of the advent of television into an upper-middle-class British household, which strikes me as an early attempt by the novel to reckon with its new rival. I wonder if anyone has made a collection of such scenes.

The book's heroine is named Kate. Her adult son Tom lives with her, as does her second husband, Dermot, and an aunt named Ethel who tries to keep out of everyone's way. The two men are to a certain extent allied against Kate in not-quite-reputable habits of leisure. Their unseemly alliance culminates in Tom's purchase of a television set.

"Why can't you read a book instead?" Kate asked [Tom]. She disdained such ways of passing time, not realising that she very seldom read herself these days and was just off for an evening in the pub with Dermot. Tom kept the television set in his bedroom and he and Dermot liked to sit there with curtains drawn against the sunshine, watching cowboy films. "Too good an evening to waste out of doors," Dermot would say, taking a last glimpse out of the bedroom window while the set was warming up—Ethel's dog lying on the hot gravel down there, a column of gnats dancing in the shaft of light under some trees and high above the trees some cirrus clouds paling and dissolving. "Right!" Tom would say, drawing up two uncomfortable bedroom chairs. On the screen, rods of light ran blindingly into one another, the picture steadied until they were able to see a packet of soap powder capering on tiny legs, singing a ditty. It then took a dive into a washing-machine, and a head of jostling bubbles, singing too, rose up.

The scene visible through the window is quiet enough to lend itself to a meditative description; the screen, by contrast, is too loud to meet with anything but sarcasm. But even more telling is the perfidy of Ethel, who means to resist but isn't strong enough to.

Sometimes Ethel joined them, looking in with a trivial excuse, begging them not to stir and lingering to watch, but as if her attention was only momentarily caught. After hovering for a while, she gradually merged into the shadowy background and was forgotten, until at last, with sick-bed caution, she tiptoed away. Like hares before a serpent, Tom and Dermot sat rigid and in silence. From time to time, their hands groped on the floor for their glasses of light ale, their cigarettes burnt to their fingers.

A chapter or so later, after deprecating the television in a gossipy letter to a friend, Ethel is mesmerized by a broadcast of Swan Lake on ice.

Is drone war just?

On Monday, December 13, I attended a panel discussion on "Drones and Targeted Killings Abroad: What is Legal and Who Decides?" It was hosted by the Federalist Society, at the Cornell Club in Manhattan, and the panelists were Ben Wizner of the ACLU and Michael W. Lewis of Ohio Northern University Law School. The moderator was P. Kevin Castel, a U.S. district court judge.

I was led there by my having complained to my friend Wesley Yang that there has been alarmingly little debate in America about whether killing by remote-controlled drones is ethical—whether it's philosophically consistent with just-war doctrine. Wesley has been researching and writing about the high-stakes legal debates associated with the war on terror—see his recent profile in New York Magazine of Evan Kohlmann, the government's most prolific terrorism expert—and he invited me—challenged me?—to come along with him to the panel.

The debate took place in a mustard yellow conference room. The Federalist Society is well-known as a conservative, strict-constructionist legal group, so it wasn't too surprising to find a fair number of older white men in dark suits, flag pins in their lapels. While I was raiding the cheese-and-crackers table, one such attendee, observing a pile of knives and an absence of forks, volunteered that "The caterer must be a lefty." It transpired that the quiet man sitting beside me during the discussion was Michael Mukasey, George W. Bush's second attorney general; his identity was revealed to me at the end of the evening when people of the left and of the right converged to have their pictures taken with him.

Introduction by Judge Castel

Jane Mayer outlined the facts about America's drone program and raised important ethical questions about it in "The Predator War," published in The New Yorker on October 26, 2009. In his introductory remarks, Judge Castel seemed to draw on Mayer's article. He noted that the U.S. has two drone programs. The first, run by the military, augments the work of troops on the ground. Castel suggested that the drones were controlled remotely with joysticks and monitored on flat-screen televisions, as the New York Times has also reported. The second program, Castel continued, "is said—I don't know—to be run out of Langley, Virginia, by the C.I.A." (Castel was careful throughout the evening to specify that the information he was presenting was secondhand, acquired by him from journalistic reports only, and that any opinions he might voice were to be understood not as representations of his personal judgment but merely as provocations, potentially fictional, intended only to stir up debate. As it happens, in a recent Guardian article about the recall from Pakistan of the CIA's station chief, whose cover was blown last week by a Pakistani man angry over drone strikes that killed his father and brother, Declan Walsh reports that the CIA now manages its drones out of its Islamabad office rather than Langley.) Castel added that "It's been said that some of the personnel will wear flight suits" while operating the drones. (This may not be true, however; Charlie Savage has reported for the Times that CIA drone operators do not wear military uniforms, in apparent contravention of the Geneva conventions, an awkward state of affairs that not long ago obliged the Obama administration to rewrite its military commission rules at the last minute while negotiating a plea bargain with Omar Khadr, a former child soldier and Guantanamo Bay detainee, downgrading the charge against Khadr from war crime to a domestic law offense, in order "to avoid seeming to implicitly concede that the C.I.A. is committing war crimes.") Castel repeated the vignette that begins Mayer's New Yorker article—the story of the August 2009 remote killing of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, while he was reclining on his roof receiving an intravenous drip. The United States and Pakistan are happy to have got rid of Mehsud, but Castel noted that the killing is thought by some to have taken place on the CIA's sixteenth attempt to strike Taliban leader. ("During this hunt," Mayer wrote, "between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon.") Given such a high rate of collateral damage, can the killing be considered a success?

Castel cited data provided to Mayer by the New America Foundation, according to which Obama in his first nine months ordered as many drone strikes as Bush had during his last three years. (More up-to-date statistics are available on the New America Foundation's website and in its February 2010 report on drone warfare; New America now claims that 45 drones strikes were ordered by the Bush administration and that the Obama administration, by contrast, ordered 51 strikes in 2009 and another 113 so far in 2010.)

Castel raised a number of questions: Do drone bombings reduce casualties of innocents by allowing operators to wait for certain identification of their target and a minimum number of bystanders? Are they a necessary means of war? Do they change the nature of war in an undesirable way, such that war no longer requires the virtues of courage and honor? (A June 2010 United Nations report warned that the U.S. drone program licensed a "'PlayStation' mentality to killing.") Are any laws broken if the individual targeted by a drone is a United States citizen? If judges have to sign warrants before the government can eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, why don't they have to vet the government's requests to assassinate them? Are any laws being broken when the drones kill people outside of Afghanistan—that is, outside the theater of war as conventionally understood? As a closing sally, Castel raised the prospect of "nanodrones"—remote-controlled killing devices small enough to slip into a window—which reminded me of Neil Stephenson's sci-fi novel The Diamond Age.

Castel then introduced Ben Wizner of the ACLU's National Security Project, who helped to represent Nasser al-Aulaqi in a recent lawsuit against the Obama administration, which in April 2010 listed as an approved target for killing al-Aulaqi's son, Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric with dual U.S. and Yemeni citizenship alleged to have incited terrorist attacks. The al-Aulaqi/al-Awlaki case was dismissed earlier this month, when federal district court judge John W. Bates declared that the father lacked sufficient legal standing to challenge the government's targeting of his son. Castel then proceeded to introduce Michael W. Lewis, a law professor at Ohio Northern University, who before taking up law served as a pilot for the U.S. Navy during the First Gulf War and the run-up to it.

Ben Wizner's remarks

"In what circumstances can Barack Obama order the death of U.S. citizens?" Wizner began. He noted that the ACLU chose to assist al-Awlaki's father in his lawsuit because the Obama administration had provided a legal opportunity by leaking to the media earlier this year its decision to target al-Awlaki for killing—a moment of transparency that the administration later backpedaled from in court, when it invoked the privilege of state secrecy in efforts to have the case dismissed. Wizner asserted that the recent dismissal of the case had been on standing rather than merits—that is, the judge ruled only that al-Awlaki's father did not have an interest in his son's welfare strong enough to give him the right to bring the matter to court; the judge did not say anything about the conditions that might give the U.S. government the right to kill one of its citizens. In fact, Wizner continued, the judge noted that the case raised "stark, and perplexing, questions," such as

Can the Executive order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?

Torture, Wizner said, is always illegal, but targeted killing is sometimes legal. According to Wizner, the ACLU does not contend that the government needs to obtain warrants before conducting targeted killings, nor does the ACLU believe that courts should be involved in real-time decision-making. Their contention is merely that such killings are only lawful in a theater of war and against an imminent danger. The Obama administration hasn't disclosed its definition of lawful killings, but since it has placed individuals on its target list for months at a time, its standards must be more permissive than those proposed by the ACLU. Wizner observed that unsupervised powers are almost always abused in the long run, and that a policy of taking the government's word for the prudence and wisdom of its actions hasn't always worked out: the Bush administration claimed that it was only detaining dangerous terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, but the majority, it turns out, are far less scary than advertised.

Through the al-Awlaki lawsuit, the ACLU was asking the government to disclose its standards for remote killing. "Due process," Wizner said, "requires at a minimum that citizens be put on notice as to when they could be put to death." He noted that the Israeli government's targeted-killing program had been challenged in court by human rights groups there, and that the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled that lethal force could be used by the government against individuals, but not for retribution, not if arrest or another lesser intervention could solve the problem, and not merely on the basis of membership in a group. The Israeli Supreme Court required that every instance of targeted killing be followed by a post-hoc investigation.

Why, Wizner asked, can't the U.S. also make explicit its legal standards? The Obama administration has set no limits so far to its power to kill specific individuals, he maintained. The administration has not said whether the killings are permissible only when a threat is imminent, and if so, how imminent. Wizner suggested that the lack of clarity about the U.S. policy might help to legitimize targeted killings by other nations, whose ethical standards and target lists might not be palatable to Americans. In March 2010, Harold Koh, legal adviser to the State Department, defended the Obama administration's targeted-killing program as justifiable as a matter of national self-defense; Koh claimed that the killings by drone were being conducted in accordance with the just-war principles of distinction (that is, they target only military personnel and equipment, not civilian ones) and proportionality (that is, they don't kill more civilians incidentally than the military target is worth). Wizner granted that Koh's argument might hold in its broad outlines, but Wizner insisted that Koh had not revealed enough details to enable anyone outside the Obama administration's inner circle to judge whether the policy was in fact justifiable.

What limits, if any, can be put to the use of military force? Wizner asked. Can a U.S. citizen be killed in Yemen, with which the United States is not at war, as well as in Afghanistan, where the United States has acknowledged it is waging war? Is an organization like Al Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula (AQAP) covered by the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), the declaration of war passed by Congress a week after 11 September 2001, even though AQAP did not exist at the time and had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks? In closing, Wizner quoted the Israeli Supreme Court: "It is when the cannons roar that we especially need the laws" (a flip of the more familiar, much-abused Ciceronian tag).

Michael W. Lewis's remarks

Lewis began by differentiating what he called the "law enforcement standard" from the "law of armed conflict standard." In law enforcement, you're only allowed to kill someone who poses an imminent threat. In war, however, you're allowed to kill your enemies whether or not they pose an immediate threat. In the al-Awlaki lawsuit, Lewis averred, the ACLU was attempting to apply a law-enforcement standard to an armed-conflict situation. Furthermore, Lewis continued, the laws of war don't recognize geopolitical borders as limits to military endeavor, and the ACLU's advocated position would create sanctuaries behind international borders where none had originally existed.

The laws of war, Lewis summarized, distinguish civilians and combatants. Combatants are only recognized as such if they belong to an organization that enforces the laws of war; in the American army, for example, a soldier who gratuitously kills an Iraqi civilian may be tried by an American court martial and imprisoned. Balancing this liability is something called the combatant's privilege: so long as combatants do not violate the laws of war, they are immune from prosecution for arson, murder, or damage to private property.

Anyone not a combatant is a civilian, and according to the Geneva Conventions, civilians may never be targeted in a military operation. But civilians also may never take part in armed conflict; if they do, they become targetable. By directing the actions of Nidal Malik Hasan (the Fort Hood shooter) and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the attempted underwear bomber of Christmas 2009), al-Awlaki crossed the line, Lewis said, and rendered himself a legitimate target of lethal force.

What's more, Lewis continued, crossing borders in pursuit of an enemy has traditionally been an accepted practice during wartime. In pursuit of FARC, the Colombian military has crossed into Ecuador; in pursuit of Hezbollah, the Israeli military has crossed into Lebanon. Neither incursion is considered a violation of the laws of war. (Asked during the question-and-answer period later about the controversy over American forces moving into Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Lewis argued that the scandal was not on account of the border crossing, but because the facts of the war were being kept secret from the American public.)

If a neutral country finds itself the host of a person engaged in hostilities with the United States, Lewis maintained, the country need not grant the United States permission to enter its territories in pursuit of him. But if the country wishes to maintain its neutrality, it must deny that person harbor. Yemen, where al-Awlaki is thought to reside, has in fact chosen to act as an ally, Lewis noted—referring, with a smile, to a State Department cable recently released by Wikileaks, which reveals that Yemen's president promised the head of U.S. Central Command in January 2010 that he would keep his people in the dark about the American bombing missions against AQAP. ("We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," said Yemen's president.)

As a matter of strategy, Lewis argued, granting terrorists political sanctuary was tantamount to giving them the initiative—allowing them to choose the next battlefield. It was, he insisted, to turn international law upside-down. (Lewis has further elaborated his support of the Obama administration's targeted-killing policy in a paper posted on the Federalist Society's website.)

Discussion

In the questions and answers that followed, the discussants made further interesting points, but this post is already rather long, and perhaps I should limit myself to relating a few of them in the course of sorting through some of my own thoughts.

When in the past I have read about the Geneva Convention's definition of combatants, the emphasis has always seemed to be on the requirement that combatants wear an identifiable uniform—a requirement that has always seemed a little arbitrary to me, especially when used to justify the indefinite detention of people who were volunteer fighters from impoverished regions, where the purchase of a uniform may have been a relative luxury. I found more ethically convincing Lewis's emphasis on the requirement that combatants belong to an organization that enforces distinction and proportionality in the waging of war. That said, unless I'm missing something, I'm not sure the difference between a lawful and an unlawful combatant is pertinent here. Lewis is arguing for the government's right to kill combatants of either kind, and the legal point at issue seems to be whether the killings may take place in territory outside the theater of war. It doesn't seem relevant that someone like al-Awlaki, by failing to belong to an armed force that obeys the laws of war, may have forfeited his right to the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention to prisoners of war.

Toward the end of the debate, Lewis said, almost as an aside, "I don't see any difference, by the way, between a drone and a manned aircraft." To my surprise, Wizner nodded. (For the record, I don't know for certain whether he nodded in agreement or merely to express something like, 'I recognize that argument,' but it seemed to me that Wizner was signaling agreement.) I see now that Koh made a similar claim in his March 2010 remarks:

There is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.

I see the force of the claim. It no doubt seemed unchivalric when swords were first superseded by gunpowder, but the point of war is to defeat the enemy while suffering as little injury oneself as possible. So the problem with drone killing isn't the cocoon of safety around the person holding the joystick. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with drone killing, but it does mean that some of my horror over the technology may be a little sentimental.

I was also surprised, during the question-and-answer period, to hear Lewis concede that he was comfortable with the proposal of "some form of post-action review" of targeted killings. It surprised me even further when he said that "the guys in Langley bother me, because they're in Langley. Whether there's law-of-war training in the CIA, I don't know." In other words, Lewis was worrying whether the CIA's operators might themselves be unlawful combatants—a question that concerns me rather more than the question of whether al-Awlaki is one. When an American soldier goes rogue, he is court-martialed. What happens to a rogue CIA officer? No doubt it's something unpleasant, or so one hopes, but the secrecy of the organization may make it all but impossible to verify whether CIA killings are in compliance with the laws of war. Given the CIA's propensity in recent years for kidnapping and torture—of the innocent as well as the probably guilty—one isn't disposed to take their good behavior on trust.

Lewis welcomed post-action review and was concerned by the secrecy shrouding the CIA's involvement; Wizner did not object to targeted killings without prior judicial review. If the two of them were representative of informed political opinion, I found myself wondering, might it be possible for Congress to agree on some legislation? Surely the soldiers operating these devices would prefer to know for certain when they were and when they weren't committing war crimes.

On further consideration, this fantasy began to seem a little overoptimistic on my part. The trouble is the chasm between the law-enforcement model and the armed-conflict model. Should terrorists be treated as criminals or as enemy soldiers? The great difference between these paradigms may be related to my niggling sense that there is something wrong with drone killing, even if it's not the remoteness of the attack. Maybe killer drones upset the balance of power between individuals and governments by making it easier to kill a specific person—by making war microlocal. It is accepted that in war a certain number of innocent bystanders are killed. In law enforcement, however, any death of an innocent is an outrage. Why do we allow soldiers to kill the "wrong" people in relatively high numbers but not police officers? Perhaps it's because we distinguish between peace and war, and we understand war to be a temporary state marked by conflict and chaos, in which a government uses force to accomplish broad aims such as taking control of a region. Under such conditions, we are willing to accept that the use of force may be imprecise. We understand that being at war is different from being at peace. Lewis's concern about crossing borders is, I think, a red herring. If FARC's soldiers move into Ecuador, then I think we understand that in their retreat, FARC's soldiers trail the boundaries of the theater of war after them. The trouble is, what happens if a few of FARC's leaders abruptly surface in Madrid? If, in such a case, the Colombian military were to start blowing up the FARC leaders' apartments, it would be reasonable of Madrid's citizens to object.

One of the benefits that people expect from government is personal security from attacks by government itself. (And protection from other governments; Madrileños expect that Spain will not attack them and that Spain will protect them from Colombia if Colombia tries to—and from FARC, for that matter.) The social contract is understood, at least in some strains of political philosophy, to be a haven from the state of war. If an individual may be killed by his government on its say-so, without judicial review before or after his killing, there is no haven from the state of war. In fact, security from such attack is so fundamental to well-being that a person vulnerable to it might be thought of as lacking a government at all. It is no remedy if a government merely promises that it will only execute dangerous enemies to social order. Citizens need to be able to feel confident about the government's epistemology; they need to be able to challenge the government's identification of enemies before the fact, or (less reassuringly) they need to be able to punish after the fact government officials who turn out to have been in error. A case as celebrated as al-Awlaki's is not where the trouble is likely to lie; given the stir about him, the governments of the United States and Yemen have probably been obliged to think long and hard about the certitude of the evidence against him. (Still, to say a word for the criminal model: if Yemen's president is willing to wink while the U.S. bombs terrorists within Yemen's borders, can't he bring himself to extradite a single terrorist for us? Does his tenure in power really depend to that extent on duplicity?) The possibility for injustice, however, will increase the further down one goes on the government's target list. What if some individuals lower down are listed because the CIA has misidentified them, as it misidentified Khalid El-Masri, an innocent German citizen whom the CIA kidnapped and tortured in 2003 and 2004 because they mistook him for a terrorist with a similar name? What if the culpability of some individuals lower down on the list has been grossly exaggerated, as was the case with the Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay? Without the protections afforded to suspects under the criminal law model, such errors would never be redressed, and might not ever even be discovered.

I'm offering these thoughts with the caveat that I'm still thinking through these issues myself. I don't feel that I've gotten to the bottom of them.

Privacy is history, 1888

In Silicon Valley Paris, the software coder Mark Zuckerberg the gossip reporter George Flack pitches his idea for a new kind of social-networking site society newspaper, where the targets will volunteer information about themselves instead of having it extracted from them by reporters, to a venture capitalist nubile young heiress:

There are ten thousand things to do that haven't been done, and I am going to do them. The society news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves (oh, they can be fixed—you'll see!) from day to day and from hour to hour and served up at every breakfast-table in the United States—that's what the American people want and that's what the American people are going to have. I wouldn't say it to every one, but I don't mind telling you, that I consider I have about as fine a sense as any one of what's going to be required in future over there. I'm going for the secrets, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want is just what isn't told, and I'm going to tell it. Oh, they're bound to have the plums! That's about played out, any way, the idea of sticking up a sign of "private" and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. You can't do it—you can't keep out the light of the Press. Now what I am going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine all over the place. We'll see who's private then! I'll make them crowd in themselves with the information, and as I tell you, Miss Francie, it's a job in which you can give me a lovely push.

Henry James, The Reverberator, 1888.

More evidence of sperm-squeezing

Looking again at "A Squeeze of the Hand," Melville's chapter about the practice of squeezing spermaceti, I noticed that Melville adds a telling bit of linguistic detail. Among the names that he gives for sperm whale detritus is slobgollion, "an appellation original with the whalemen." He defines it as "an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membrances of the case, coalescing."

It occurred to me that if sperm-squeezing was a real practice, then slobgollion must have been a real word, as well as an unusual one—and that with Google it's now very easy to gather information about unusual words. A quick consultation with the OED proved inconclusive—though I did win a round of OED bingo—that is, when I looked up slobgollion, I found no more than the Melville passage I was trying to verify. Somewhat more helpfully, William Clark Russell's 1883 Sailor's Dictionary defines the word as a "whaleman's term for an oozy, stringy substance found in sperm oil." Clark Russell's dictionary is so much later than Melville's, though, that it's possible he was just borrowing from Melville.

A more intriguing find was a report by Robert Clarke, "Open Boat Whaling in the Azores: The History and Present Methods of a Relic Industry," Discovery Reports Issued by the National Institute of Oceanography, vol. 26 (1954): 283-356. Clarke visited the Azores in the summer of 1949 to study the natives' continued practice of open-boat whaling. "The methods employed," Clarke writes, "are a survival of that old-time whaling generally believed to have quite vanished from the seas, . . . learned from American whalers in the nineteenth century" and including not only the chase but also "the 'cutting in' of the whales and . . . the 'trying out' of their blubber in iron pots on the shore."

Describing a heat purification system for oil and blubber at Negrito, on the isle of Terceira, Clarke writes:

The try-house stands nearby on somewhat higher ground, before a cemented space where two stone blubber tanks are excavated. Within the try-house there is a battery of four pots which are used for blubber only. The spermaceti from the case and junk is boiled out separately in an adjoining open-air try-works whose two pots are made not from cast iron but from riveted sheets of wrought iron. Spermaceti needs a lower temperature for trying out than blubber, and I have been told, rather obscurely, that this explains the use of sheet iron pots. At several Azores stations the case and junk are tried out indiscriminately with the blubber, so that the cooked spermaceti or 'head oil' is not kept separate. But where this separation is carried out, I understand that it is still customary, as in the whaleship days, to 'squeeze sperm' before putting the head matter into the pots. Squeezing sperm means plunging the hands into a tub of the semi-liquid spermaceti and there squeezing them together, so as to remove 'slobgollion', the fine strings and tatters of membrane which are suspended in the spermaceti and which would tend to char in the pots and somewhat affect the quality of the head oil.

So was sperm-squeezing real? I'm still not sure. The very word slobgollion, not being Portuguese, is probably one that Clarke brought with him to the Azores, borrowed from his reading of Melville. Also, the telltale phrase "I understand" seems to indicate that Clarke did not witness the practice himself. Still, he was told by someone he trusted that it did take place. Note that Clarke's understanding of the purpose of sperm squeezing is not Melville's but the one William M. Davis gave in Nimrod of the Sea (1874).

Pedestrianism in novelists

I thought I had blogged about the prodigious walking of Wilkie Collins back when I wrote about him for the LRB, but I don't seem to have.

In The Woman in White, Collins's hero Walter Hartright is eternally walking. His first vision of the Woman in White, in fact, comes during a walk from Hampstead to his apartment in the Inns of Court, a distance of slightly more than four miles. But even though Walter begins his walk after dark, he takes the long way home:

I determined to stroll home in the purer air, by the most round-about way I could take; to follow the white winding paths across the lonely heath; and to approach London through its most open suburb by striking into the Finchley-road, and so getting back, in the cool of the new morning, by the western side of the Regent's Park.

According to Google, if in your walk from Hampstead to the Inns of Court you insist on going by Finchley Road and the west side of Regent's Park, you nearly double your trip, to slightly more than seven miles long. No wonder that Walter later, in a high frenzy of sleuthing, scoffs at fear of distance:

"How far is it to Knowlesbury from this place?" [Walter asks.]

"A long stretch, sir," said the clerk, with that exaggerated idea of distances and that vivid perception of difficulties in getting from place to place, which is peculiar to all country people. "Nigh on five mile, I can tell you!"

It was still early in the forenoon. There was plenty of time for a walk to Knowlesbury, and back again to Welmingham. . . .

Though hobbled by something he called gout, and addicted to opiates, Collins himself walked vigorously. Biographer Catherine Peters reports that during an 1873 book tour of America, Collins was dismayed to discover that Americans did not carry walking-sticks and did not like to go on walks. From New York, Collins wrote home to a friend of his chagrin:

I . . . thought nothing of a daily constitutional from my hotel in Union-square to Central Park and back. Half a dozen times on my way, friends in carriages would stop and beg me to jump in. I always declined, and I really believe that they regarded my walking exploits as a piece of English eccentricity.

Collins's constitutional measured about five miles.

Pedestrianism in novels

I am perennially curious about the distances that characters in nineteenth-century novels are happy to walk. Turgenev's Torrents of Spring happens to offer some geographic clues. The hero, Dimitri Pavlovitch Sanin, stays at the White Swan Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1840, when there was as yet no railroads to carry him home to Russia. The novella fails to locate Sanin's hotel precisely, and Google doesn't yet index fictional travel accommodations as far back as 1840, but on his first night in town, Sanin takes a stroll.

He went in to look at Danneker's Ariadne, which he did not much care for, visited the house of Goethe, of whose works he had, however, only read Werter, and that in the French translation. He walked along the bank of the Maine, and was bored as a well-conducted tourist should be.

Johann Heinrich von Dannecker's statue Ariadne on the Panther is lodged in a museum known as the Liebieghaus, and the house where Goethe was born is also easy to locate, so it's safe to say that Sanin was staying in what is today downtown Frankfurt.

Later in the novel, after Sanin has fallen in love, his beloved orders him to stay away from her for a day. He passes the time with her brother:

After drinking coffee, the two friends set off together—on foot, of course—to Hausen, a little village lying a short distance from Frankfort, and surrounded by woods. The whole chain of the Taunus mountains could be seen clearly from there. The weather was lovely; the sunshine was bright and warm, but not blazing hot . . . The two young people soon got out of the town, and stepped out boldly and gaily along the well-kept road.

The family dog accompanies them; they play leap-frog, run races, sing songs; and they space out the walk by drinking and eating at three inns. They're not, in other words, in any hurry. How far did they go? If you ask Google Maps for walking directions from the Liebieghaus to Goethe's house, and thence to the district of Hausen (which is now part of Frankfurt, and no longer a separate village), the trip is about 4 miles one way, and should take about an hour and twenty minutes on foot. An eight-mile, three-hour round trip is not a terribly taxing walk, though few today would take it uncomplainingly. An equivalent walk would take me from my neighborhood, Park Slope, Brooklyn, to the Soho shopping district in downtown Manhattan.

Into the horizon

I found this bookplate, unglued but still tucked into the front endpapers, in a history that I spent today reading. The book, which I bought used last week, was published in the 1930s; the Internet tells me that Edwin B. Coddington, its sometime owner, was the longtime chair of Lafayette College's history department and wrote the definitive history of the Battle of Gettysburg, published in 1968, some time after his death. I like the way the bookplate evokes the idea of American history. I've been using it as a bookmark, and I must have looked at it half a dozen times before I had a Sesame Street moment and realized that the Indian and the airplane don't belong in the same picture.

Clash of the titans

Sometime on Friday night, the New York Times reports, Amazon deactivated the Buy Now buttons on its website for all books published by the Macmillan group, including such imprints as Farrar Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, and St. Martin's Press. As of this writing, you cannot buy a new copy of the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell from Amazon, though it's still available from Barnes & Noble, Powells, and other indie booksellers. The same is true of thousands of other titles.

This is a bit of a stunner. Macmillan and Amazon have been arguing, it transpires, over the pricing of e-books, but Amazon yanked Macmillan's ink-and-paper as well as its electronic books—bypassing conventional weapons in favor of first-use nuclear.

As a writer with friends who work at Macmillan imprints, my sympathies are with the publisher. To judge by the comments being left at the New York Times article on the conflict, however, quite a few people are siding with Amazon, in many cases because they believe it's greedy of publishers to demand higher prices for e-books. Greed, no doubt, exists on both sides, living as we do under capitalism, but greed alone doesn't explain the dispute. Yes, Amazon wants to sell e-books for $9.99 or less, and Macmillan wants Amazon to sell them for $15 or less. But as Macmillan's CEO John Sargent explains, in a statement released today as an advertisement to the book-industry newsletter Publisher's Lunch, Amazon and Macmillan aren't at the moment fighting to see who can make more money on a book sale. They're fighting to see who can lose more money. This is a very peculiar battle.

And it may only be the beginning. My sense, as a somewhat interested observer, is that the year 2010 is going to see radical change in the way books are sold. The catalyst, I suspect, is this month's announcement of half a dozen new handheld electronic reading devices. Apple's Ipad tablet is the most famous, but the Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of January saw the announcement of the Skiff Reader, Plastic Logic's Que Pro Reader, Entourage's Edge, and Spring Design's Alex. Not all of these are likely to make it to market, but those that do will be competing there with Sony's Reader, Amazon's Kindle, and Barnes & Noble's Nook. Google seems to be planning to sell e-books soon. In other words, a large number of capitalists have been betting, lately, that increasing numbers of people want to read e-books.

Let's leave to one side, for the duration of this blog post, the question of whether it is wise for our society to spend colossal sums of money replacing an existing technology that is durable, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing. (I will let slip this much: No, I do not care how many trees die. They should be so lucky as to be reincarnated as, say, the poems of Surrey. Ents, do you worst!) Assume, for the sake of argument, that a preponderance of these capitalists will prove lucky in their bets, and that a lot of people are going to buy these devices. That suggests, as I wrote in passing in a recent review of Adrian Johns's new history of intellectual piracy, that a lot of people will soon be roving the internet in search of free or cheap electronically available texts.

Until recently, books have not suffered from internet-assisted piracy the way that music or film has. That's mostly because it's easy to make a digital copy of a CD; you slip it into a slot on the side of your computer and click Import. Making a digital copy of a physical book, on the other hand, is cumbersome, as a book pirate recently confessed to the blog The Millions. At the very least you have to turn all the pages. To do it elegantly, you even have to volunteer your services as a proofreader, which is not very many people's idea of fun, and I say that as someone who has done his share.

But if publishers themselves are selling digital versions of their books, and all that's needed to liberate them is a little hacking, the calculus changes. Hacking is fun in a way that proofreading is not. Let us pause here and observe a moment of silence for the death of the idea that book pirates, more literary and therefore more moral than their peers, will somehow prove honorable, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. To the contrary, the pirate interviewed by the Millions said that he deliberately avoided stealing the works of the most successful authors, because they can afford lawyers. Instead he limits his purloining to the work of less commercial writers, such as John Barth, whom he calls "someone who no longer sells very well, I imagine." Such nobility! "From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." If electronic reading devices catch on, the threat of piracy to book publishers—and to authors, at all income levels—is very real.

Of course, large swaths of the publishing industry have not waited for pirates in order to be undone. Since the earliest days of the world wide web, newspapers and magazines have pillaged themselves, giving their articles away for free in pursuit of larger audience share. This is now widely understood to have been a mistake. Newspapers like the Times have many more readers online than they ever had in print, but even with these greater numbers, online ads bring in tiny sums compared to print ads. And online readers pay nothing. In the journalistic world that I happen to inhabit, much of the excitement about Apple's new device has been driven by a hope that it will offer a chance to press the reset button. People stole MP3s, but they buy ring tones. They downloaded software for free, but they buy apps. Perhaps, publishers hope, people will prove willing to buy newspaper subscriptions on their Apple tablets, even though they've never been willing to pay to read them in their desktop browsers. (Long Island's Newsday recently revealed that three months after putting its website behind a pay wall, only thirty-five people have purchased subscriptions.) Thus a week before Apple announced its tablet, the Times announced that by next year, it will be charging its online readers. Will the new business model work? Will newspapers be saved? Who knows, but there isn't much to lose by trying. In the weeks before Apple's announcement, I found myself muttering, in an echo of a recent, very bad movie trailer, "Unleash the Kraken." We might as well find out what the Kraken will do. At the very least, if it finishes the print media off, we will be spared having to listen to further hectoring sermons from internet triumphalists.

Which reminds me that I've strayed from my topic: Amazon. Book publishers, unlike newspaper publishers, still have a lot to lose. About nine months ago, I received an email alert from a friend whose excellent book of nonfiction had just been published and who had discovered, to his dismay, that it was accruing one-star reviews on Amazon, not because readers disliked his book but because they objected that its Kindle price was only a few dollars less than its hardcover price. (The anti-Kindle-price reviews appeared on the webpage of both the Kindle and the hardcover version and figured into his book's combined star rating.) He was caught in the crossfire of an early skirmish of the war that went nuclear this weekend. Eventually the Kindle price of his book was lowered, though I don't know who blinked. I remember thinking at the time that the one-star ratings were a bad sign, because they suggested that Amazon had in a way already won the dispute over e-book pricing. Consumers already felt that e-books ought to be no more than ten dollars, and felt it with so much indignation and righteousness that they were willing to punish the very author they wanted to read, if they thought he was charging such sums. (My friend, of course, had no control over the pricing of any of the versions of his book.)

Consumers had come to feel that way largely because Amazon had trained them to, by keeping the prices of nearly all its e-books below ten dollars. Though few consumers understood it then, and probably few still understand it today, Amazon did so by sacrificing heaps and heaps of cash. Most publishers have until now sold their e-books to Amazon for the same wholesale price that they sell their hardcovers—roughly half the hardcover's list price. It is up to a retailer like Amazon whether to sell the book to consumers at its list price, as printed on the inside front flap, or at a discount. With e-books, Amazon has usually offered a discount so low that it actually loses money. That is, Amazon buys for $12 an e-book whose hardcover list price is $24.95, and then Amazon sells the e-book to its customers for $9.95.

Why would Amazon want to do such a thing? When Amazon first introduced its Kindle reading device, the reception was tepid. But Amazon improved the device in later models, and thanks to its aggressive low pricing on e-books, it now reports that the Kindle and e-books are selling briskly. In other words, with the money that it has lost by discounting e-books, Amazon has bought market share for its e-book reader and for itself as an e-book retailer. To put it still another way, Amazon sped up the American public's adoption of e-books by unilaterally lowering the American public's idea of what the natural price of an e-book should be. The outrage of the Amazon customers who punished my friend with one-star reviews, and the outrage of commenters siding with Amazon on the New York Times blog post this weekend about the Macmillan-vs.-Amazon dispute, suggest that it may be too late for publishers like Macmillan to alter that idea.

Newspapers have no one to blame but themselves for having taught the public that they have a right to read newspapers online for free. Publishers, on the other hand, have woken up to the unpleasant discovery that the value of their work is being cheapened in the public mind by a third party: Amazon.

Some consumers have objected that e-books must be cheaper to make than ink-on-paper books. A simple cost breakdown by Money magazine last year, however, suggested that only about 10 percent of a book's list price goes to printing. But ink-on-paper books have to be shipped, stored, and (when they go unsold) returned, and e-books would be spared these costs, too, as this analysis suggests. Also, according to TBI Research, because e-books are likely to end up with a lower list price after the dust clears, author royalties, calculated as a percentage of the list price, are likely to be lower, too—additional savings! Yay! When all these savings are added up, do you succeed in dropping a list price of $28 to one of $9.95? That's a big drop. Profit margins at book publishers now are rumored to be no more than 10 percent, where they exist at all. It may not be possible for a single company to publish e-books at that price and also retain the infrastructure necessary to publish ink-on-paper books.

To return to the dispute of the moment: Macmillan has probably been selling its e-books to Amazon at the wholesale price of about $12, and Amazon has been selling them retail for about $10. Macmillan says that it would like to sell its e-books at the wholesale price of about $10.45, and have Amazon sell them for the retail price of $14.95. In other words, Macmillan was offering to earn $2 less per e-book. Amazon, however, insisted that it would prefer to take a $2 loss on each e-book, instead, and became so indignant over the matter that it has now ceased selling any Macmillan titles, print or electronic. Macmillan's proposal is known as the "agency model" for e-book pricing, and the company probably only dared attempt it because Apple has promised that it will sell e-books for its new tablet on exactly those terms. (Amazon has said that they're willing to accept the agency model, starting in June, but only if an e-book's list price does not exceed $9.99.)

As I said at the beginning, my sympathies in this dispute are with Macmillan. Why shouldn't a book publisher be able to exercise some control over their product's price? Apple, to choose a wild example, rigidly controls the prices at which retailers may sell its products, and as Paul Collins noted in 2007, the legal barriers to publishers' exercise of such control no longer exist. Here, alas, is where the pirates come in again. Pirates don't bother when legal copies are available cheaply and easily. What's perhaps most breathtaking about the Amazon-Macmillan dispute is how little, finally, is at stake: should the highest price of an e-book be $9.95 or $14.95? No one dreams any more that it's going to be $28. What's being fought over is control, and the reason control is being fought over so viciously is that the only way such massive cost savings are going to be achieved is by consolidation—by collapsing a few of the intermediary steps somewhere between the creation of a book and the reading of it. Will you some day download your e-books directly from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux's website? Will Amazon some day be the publisher of Jonathan Franzen's novels? Some future between these two outcomes is more likely to happen, but precisely where the division will fall remains to be seen. Authors, in the meantime, had better ask their agents to negotiate their e-book royalties very carefully, seeing as how, while the titans rage, the financial analysts have already factored into their bottom lines the expectation that someone else will be eating our slice of the pie.